I went on a wee bit of an adventure on Wednesday afternoon. There are a couple of megalithic monuments in the area around me. The largest is an old Iron Age hill fort called Burrough Hill and it is a country park.

This is the path going from the car park to the hill fort itself. This is looking back towards the car park and this is a slab of ice. The weather was cold when I was there and it was raining.

The path leading inside the hill fort.

Which I didn't take. I just ran up the side of this earthwork towards the trig point.

Where I looked right.

And then left.

That stone marker you can see in the distance marks the extreme left hand corner of the fort.

After running back down to the bottom of the earthwork I followed a path down the side of the hill fort for a short way.

And I think you'd agree with me that it'd be a hell of a job to attack the sides of the hill fort directly.

@oldhat i am sure there are HDR tutorials but the best way I've been able to do it is to make sure to find the right exposure. If your camera has bracketing I like to first find the right exposure for a normal photo then set the bracketing to 2.0 stops +/-, then you can use photoshop or programs like photomatix to align the photos. I take 3 photos because that's all my camera's bracketing can do. Some HDR has 5 or even 7 different exposed shots....hope that helps. :0

Even though I'm Not A Photographer, I still quite enjoyed Trey Ratcliff's HDR tutorial, because it goes off on all sorts of related tangents past "now adjust your slider to this specific number." He also goes on past the usual "here's your perfectly serviceable HDR image" to discuss some cleanup, masking, etc finishing touches that I think some folks might keep as professional secrets, but really give you a good idea of how you can add a bit of subtle polish if that's your thing.

So thanks to the inspiring HDR shots on here and the WONDERFUL tutorial that Ariana linked, I've been hit by the bug and after some preparing, I went out to take some shots and try out HDR for the first time. Here are some of the results:

@ oldhat: A couple more resources for you, first a tutorial on exposure blending in Photoshop that addresses some of what is going on behind the scenes in blending plugins.

And then some Free Open Source Software for making panoramas and HDR images, Hugin. It's been a minute since I checked it last, but Hugin was great and has had the benefit of several Google Summer of Code projects since.

@oldhat I love the first one, it has a great atmosphere and feeling to it. I am really happy you went out and took those ;0 I am heading back up to school tomorrow and plan on doing some night hdr there this weekend. l